LuneOS September Stable Release: Decaf

The long wait is over #LuneOS and #webOS fans! We’re back with a new release called “Decaf” which we believe will be a milestone in terms of developments and the way forward!

So you’re wondering what we’ve been up to the past 2+ months?

Well, actually a whole lot when you look at our changelog! We’ve been able to migrate from Qt 5.7 via 5.8 to 5.9.2 which is a long term support (LTS) release of Qt. This brings our web capabilities a lot more up to date! We’re on Chromium 56 based release now which dates back to January this year. This brings a lot of interesting new and modern HTML5 features such as Web Components that are used by Google’s Polymer framework, for example. It also offers us better plugin support. It’s now technically possible to sideload Flash & WideVine plugins and the sites using these can see and use the plugins. The plugins cannot be distributed in the image due to licensing issues, but users are free to sideload them.

This opens up the possibility to watch DRM protected content on sites like Netflix, YouTube etc.

The migration to Chromium 56 caused a lot of layout issues for all Enyo 1.0 apps which needed to be addressed at the same time as we made sure that the Enyo 1.0 apps we’re using can be run and debugged in Chrome on the desktop.

The new version of Qt also brings a simplified API for Wayland.

Work has been done on the stability issues with the Touchpad and it’s a lot more stable now. The backlight being always on for Hammerhead (Nexus 5) has been solved too and the VirtualBox image is working properly again!

We have been able to migrate our Mako (Nexus 4) and Hammerhead (Nexus 5) to use Project Halium. This means that all our Android & webOS based targets are now using Project Halium as a basis. In the near future we plan to work more closely together with Project Halium and use their kernels with our patches instead of maintaining the kernels by ourselves. This is expected to be completed by the next release. Using Halium kernels will also allow LuneOS ports for supported Halium devices to become a lot more easy and straightforward.

Quite a number of the UI bits in various QML apps have been reworked to use QtQuickControls2 styling for LuneOS. This will allow to have unified components to be used across various QML apps. It will also allow a better experience on HiDPI and retina screens.

The following items on our to-do list will be where we focus next:

Various UI tweaks

Messaging improvements

Camera improvements

Fix known issues on the various targets

Bring back official support for Touchpad 4G (current build works on Touchpad 4G but only WiFi)

The usual

Download and Install

Feel free to download the updated builds to get started. Tenderloin, Mako and Hammerhead remain our focus for now, but the emulator & Grouper work too.

Please note that in order to use the latest stable builds Nexus 4 (Mako) and Nexus 5 (Hammerhead) you need to flash the CM 12.1 images first using CWM/TWRP. In order to do so, you might be required to do a “factory reset” or at least “wipe cache”. CWM/TWRP will indicate when this is needed. After successfully flashing CM 12.1, make sure to boot it at least once before going back to CWM/TWRP to flash the latest LuneOS image! We have provided links to CM 12.1 for these 3 images on our device pages below.